24
December 2009 Too much stuff has been happening, too much snow
has been getting in the way of it happening, and I'm afraid we've only
just begun to notice the approach of Christmas. Here's
a time-wasting e-card for you
all....

17
December 2009Rob
Holdstock's funeral. A substantial crowd at the Unitarian chapel
in Hampstead for a not at all religious celebration of what a wonderful
person Rob was. Rob came and went, most appropriately, in a wicker
coffin with holly round the sides. More about this moving, exhilarating,
funny and heartbreaking afternoon will follow in a planned memorial
supplement to the January Ansible. (Anyone who knew Rob is
welcome to contribute a recollection or anecdote –
contact form here.) Afterwards, there was
a huge fall of snow.

15
December 2009 Monday the 14th was Moving Day for Hazel's
father, and everything went well – except that I now ache a lot.
Miraculously, the phone, computer and broadband connection were all up
and running by Tuesday afternoon, with some help from the BT man who
spent 45 minutes up a pole outside the house despite bitter cold. (For
family members reading this: if you didn't get a change-of-address note,
ask me.) Here is a small unsolicited plug
for some extremely efficient chaps with a big red van:

12
December 2009 Battle systems ready! We're going over the top!
Dies irae, dies illa ... well, not quite, but tomorrow Hazel and
I begin the all too exciting process of getting her father installed in
his new house. Expect no coherence for a little while. "And
gentlemen in England now a-bed Shall think themselves accursed they were
not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That fought
with us upon the Moving Day." My distraction was such that I
entirely forgot my Interzone
column deadline, but luckily the editor reminded me today and readers
will not after all be spared.  In other news, the Fans Across
the World newsletter which used to be hosted at
the Glasgow sf archive
(when I ran the thing) now has a
home at Bill Burns's eFanzines.com. 
Peter Watts wrote a very
gentlemanly response to
my review of him
ten years ago. I firmly believe he's the victim and not the aggressor in
this
mess, and have sent a donation towards the all too likely legal
fees.

2
December 2009 Filthy weather, but duty called – to
London for a Rob Holdstock memorial gathering organized with terrifying
efficiency by Malcolm Edwards. Having struggled through the downpour to
a nice warm London-bound train, I thought the worst was over: but at
Paddington they'd closed off the Underground. Something, possibly the
wrong sort of rain, had tripped the smoke alarms down there. Go, they
told everyone, to the Hammersmith & City Line at the far end of the
station. A huge crowd went, to meet a huger crowd coming the other way
through a row of six electronic turnstiles in a not terribly wide
overpass. Five turnstiles were set to let people out of the H&CL;
only one to let them in. I was mere feet from the dread portal when
London Transport staff decided to simplify things by resetting this
turnstile to match the other five. No Entry. Now the overpass was
choking up at one end with further hordes redirected from the main
Underground, and at the other with seemingly endless waves of commuters
from the H&CL platforms. Pressure increased. The little knot of LT
staff behind the barrier refused to answer questions, which as time went
by grew loud and annoyed. If this turned nasty, I thought, at least I
wouldn't have to write it up ("Obscure sci-fi journalist crushed in
freak crowd accident."). This impasse continued for some while,
with the occasional shouts getting angrier, until at last some slightly
more sensible station functionary announced repeatedly that the
Hammersmith & City Line was now officially closed from the
Paddington side, and by slow degrees got everyone in the now quite
dangerous-seeming overpass and access stairs moving the same way,
towards the main concourse and the possibility of oxygen. After breaking
free I plodded through steady rain to Edgware Road, where the tube was
working as normal. Gasp.  The Gathering was in the upstairs room
of a St Martin's Lane pub once patronized by Rob Holdstock and friends.
Despite the glum occasion it was good to meet many of the usual suspects
from publishing parties, old Milfords and old London pub meetings,
including the Charnocks, Judith Clute, Malcolm Edwards, Chris Evans, Jo
Fletcher, David Garnett, Roy Kettle & Kathleen Mitchell, the
Kilworths, Bobbie Lamming, Chris Priest, and David Wingrove & Susan
Oudot. Sarah Biggs bravely made an appearance; so did one of Rob's
brothers and a few non-sf friends. Many fine photos of Rob were on show,
and likewise a certain publisher's current editions of his books,
including the still amazingly impressive Mythago Wood. The
funeral will be later this month.

19
November 2009 Back to the work routine after an excellent
Novacon: Ansible bits,
SFX column, endless bloody paperwork. Brother Jon brags that
he's getting
goodreviews
for his new musical show in Chicago,
All
the Fame of Lofty Deeds: "Hello everybody – thanks
to the talented people at the House Theater (and some really great
reviews – see above), me and Mark Guarino's incursion into the
land of bright lights and greasepaint has got off to a fantastic start
– if you are near the windy city come and check out this strange
twisty thing we have made – it runs Thursdays to Sunday til Dec
20th (and possibly longer the way things are looking) at the Chopin
Theater in fashionable Wicker Park...." For my own part, Charles de
Lint gives Starcombing
a nice write-up in the
December F&SF
(scroll down or search for "Langford"). And I won £25 on
the Premium Bonds today!

14
November 2009 Here I am enjoying myself at
Novacon. The only reasons for
sharing this unstupendous information are that (a) I am trying wifi from
a netbook for the first time ever, and having committed email am
wondering whether it's possible to update this page too; (b) the hotel,
the Park Inn in Nottingham, has a health and fitness club called
Innaction. Sounds like my kind of exercise.

6
November 2009 Something I forgot to include in
Ansible 268
was a response to the latest Frequently Asked Question, "Do you
know about this new games magazine called
The Ancible?"
Yes: Kenny Robb, MD of its publishing company, enquired in September
whether I had any problem with the name. Me: "I've been
running my newsletter Ansible for thirty years (and one month)
with the blessing of SF author Ursula Le Guin, who coined the word in a
1960s novel. No objection at all to your use of a different spelling,
provided you promise never to object to my title!" Such are the
agreed terms of the Ansible/Ancible treaty.  What
is the circulation of Ansible, as one person has Frequently
Asked? When I checked at the end of October, there were exactly 3,600
people on the email list and the 1 October issue had been viewed by
3,377 website visitors. 208 people apparently read it via CIX, and an
unknown number on Usenet rec.arts.sf.fandom and uk.people.sf.fans. I now
print a mere 100 paper copies (distributed by mail and as freebies at
the Reading Oxfam bookshop); more
are run off by official or unofficial agents for distribution with
the Brum Group newsletter (~100?), the Prophecy apa (~10), in Australia
(???), as part of James Bacon's sf outreach program (~100 but only
sometimes), etc etc. If I knew the circulation of Interzone, I
could add in the people who read the "Ansible Link" digest
column there. No point in counting the Facebook group (then 531 members)
or LiveJournal syndication page (374), since people notified of a new
issue by these routes will either proceed to the web page or recoil with
a cry of "Bloody hell, is that thing still appearing?"
But if I had the brazen nerve of a magazine publicity department I would
total all the above figures, multiply by some arbitrary factor –
known as the cosmological constant – on the assumption that every
issue is read by an entire nuclear family including the dog, and publish
the resulting fantasy as Ansible's official circulation.
Advertise now! Except that we don't run ads.  Although the Aged
Father-in-Law has brilliantly scheduled his house move for the first day
of Novacon (argh shriek gibber), I
expect to be at the convention.  Happy discovery at Sainsbury's: a
spindle of CD-Recordables at one-third original price. This supermarket
knows what some people get up to with CDs, as indicated by the
sticker....

20
October 2009 It's been pretty stressful this last week or two.
Hazel's aged father was awaiting a much-needed operation, with
arrangements going wrong in all conceivable ways including urgent
documents getting held up in the post. The op took place on Saturday and
he's just been allowed home for a while – Hazel is looking after
him in Wheatley while in Reading I wonder whether you can do pizzas in
the toaster. Next, the parental house move....  A more personal
upheaval was the writing of my first short story of 2009, which proved
hugely recalcitrant. Too much nonfiction over too many years pollutes
the precious creative fluids. (Cf. Cyril Connolly's Enemies of
Promise. At Milford conferences John Murry – "Richard
Cowper" – liked to quote, "Whom the gods wish to destroy
they first call promising.")  I had thought that heavily
symbolic art after the fashion of G.F. Watts or
William
Holman Hunt had died out long ago, but then I saw
this
allegory of the origins of the US Constitution. Oh blimey, the
captions, the mouseover captions! Elsewhere the dread painting has been
naughtily
recaptioned and
ichorously
spoofed.  Authors! Do your publisher's bright young
publicity people
sound
like this? If so, shoot them while there is yet time.

25
September 2009 Into London yesterday for the Gollancz autumn
party. The traditional wander down Charing Cross Road was, as is now
traditional, depressing: there always seems to be another bookshop
missing. This is also true of Bloomsbury. I hoped to revisit some
remembered book dealers in the Museum Street/Coptic Street area but
they'd all gone. The Atlantis Bookshop is a lonely survivor. Farewell
literature, hello woo-woo. (Likewise in Charing Cross Road: I can
understand the pressure of tourism favouring pubs, restaurants and
fast-food outlets, but why the arcane Chinese herbal remedies? Is this
what people visit London for?)  As usual, the party was fun but
inaudibility rapidly set in, not only for hearing-aid wearers. Though
art shows and friendly acoustics are not at all incompatible, the
October Gallery venue isn't much interested in the latter. Whenever
anyone got within two feet of a wall, gallery staff would pop up with
stern warnings not to touch the priceless artwork. Malcolm Edwards made
a lengthy State of the Nation speech of which I couldn't hear a word;
however, the sarky comments from Gollancz staff standing near me were
sufficiently entertaining. Notables in the seething crowd included Steve
Baxter, Alex Bell, Pat Cadigan, Jaine Fenn, Jo Fletcher, David Garnett ["It's
the 40th anniversary of my first masterpiece this month (definitely an
Unforgettable Year for Literature) and Gollancz are kindly celebrating
the event ..."], Amanda Hemingway, Rob Holdstock, Steve Jones, Roz
Kaveney, Ian McDonald, Chris Priest, Robert Rankin, Adam Roberts, Geoff
Ryman, Simon Spanton, David Wingrove and several more frightfully
important persons whom I'd remember if only the kindly catering folk
hadn't refilled my glass quite so often. Good old Gollancz. The
promotional book of the evening – or the imminent remainder,
depending how you interpret the urge to shift a huge pile of freebies
– was
Charlaine
Harris'sDead
until Dark.  BoingBoing claims to have pinpointed
the
perfect Daily Mail headline. Not as memorable, I felt, as
the News of the World classic "Nudist Welfare Mans Model
Wife Fell For The Chinese Hypnotist From The Co-op Bacon Factory".
Checking that wording via Google, I was delighted to find it should have
begun with the additional word "Legless", only there wasn't
room.
Here's
the story, which also reminds us of the New York Post's "Headless
Man Found in Topless Bar".  I've resisted the urge to examine
the new Dan Brown in hope of one of his trademark opening sentences ("World-famous
freemason Ban Drown lurched, reeled, belched in sudden agony and
pitilessly exploded."), but
Adam
Roberts has some pithy comments.

17
September 2009 I doubt that anyone wants an RSS feed for these
occasional diary entries (as below), but what the hell:
here's one anyway. Still
experimental, mind you. May contain nuts.

16
September 2009 Hazel's father still plans to move to Reading,
and even put in an offer for a house without actually visiting it (all
done via Hazel's reports and many emailed photos). He thought he'd
better have a look before signing the contract, though, and so on Monday
we all hung around for an hour and a quarter in blazing heat outside a
locked house while – as it later emerged – our friendly
estate agent had spent 15 minutes at entirely the wrong address before
giving up. Several increasingly ratty mobile phone calls later, after
every weed in the garden had been thoroughly studied and committed to
memory, there was just time for a ten-minute inspection of the interior
before the Aged P. rushed home again.  Meanwhile, Hazel had been
longing for a faster computer, and I wanted to replace
the little machine
whose hard drive had failed too often. Weekend: asked the excellent Jim
Bisset of EQ Consultants for quotes.
Monday lunchtime: quotes received. Late Monday afternoon: accepted.
Tuesday, 8:30am and 9:40am: machines delivered. The next best thing to
instant gratification.  Minor obsessions, number 5,271,009: a
long-standing niggle about the Ansible
website was that many masthead cartoons in the on-line archive had
been poorly reduced in size – jagged/faded lines, that sort of
thing. Now they're all, or nearly all, redone with
better tools; and the
site map page
provides links for
every artist. This page's SF Quote of the Moment is randomly
selected, by the way, from a list of about 120. Further suggestions
welcome.  Years after everyone else, the Telegraph has
finally noticed
Dan
Brown's prose. As Tolkien put it long ago: "Far, far below
the deepest delving of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless
things. Even Thog knows them not. They
are older than he. Now I have walked there, but I will bring no report
to darken the light of day."

7
September 2009 Since the
Google Book Settlement
was much on my mind (see
17 July), I went on about the tiresomeness of its website in a
column for SFX, written in early August. Imagine my excitement
on discovering a few days ago that some of the greatest irritations
– notably, the way you couldn't discover whether they'd illicitly
digitized one of your books until the very end of the registration/claim
process – had been fixed. Also, all the Langford titles of which
it was mysteriously reported that they "May be digitized on or
before May 5, 2009 without authorization" (hardly satisfactory
information to receive in August) were now confirmed as having been
pirated by the Googlebastards. Argh! Upcoming column already out of
date! Fortunately our hero editor David Bradley was able to take on
board some eleventh-hour corrections.....  Since my last entry
here I have of course published
Ansible 266
– for which an urgent
TAFF announcement arrived some days too late. 
Gary
Farber remembersAbigail
Frost.

26
August 2009 Here's confirmation that after 30 years of
publication, Ansible
(like its editor's hair) has succumbed to that dread phenomenon the
Greying of Science Fiction Fandom. It's plugged on the "Superbyways"
page of the greyer-than-grey The
Oldie (September 2009). In the same issue's editorial, Richard
Ingrams brags that his official ABC circulation figure is now 34,209
– which compares interestingly with the world-bestriding
SFX at
31,327.  Not-so-good news: the rotters at BeWrite Books have
decided to put Earthdoom
out of print. This could be your last chance to buy before terminal
disaster and oblivion! (Yes, I'm talking with
my esteemed co-author
about what happens next.)

24
August 2009 It is time for a very large drink. I seem to have
been wrestling for weeks with the massive bound proofs of
Steven
Erikson'sDust
of Dreams, volume nine of the Malazan Book of the
Interminable. The writing's fine, but there's such a huge lot of it, and
the version I've only just finished is interestingly paginated: 1-552,
then 607-652, then 593-606 in reverse order, then 553-592, and
finally 653-889. Thank you so much, Bantam Press, for this added
challenge.

13
August 2009 Cheryl Morgan brought a blush to my cheek with a
kindly mention in her Hugo
speech.  On receiving a review copy of Jim Butcher's fantasy
Cursor's
Fury, I naturally expected the companion volumes to be Icon's
Passion and Menu's Wrath, the whole making up the "Windows
on the West" trilogy in which plucky young Enduser must overcome
terminal hazards to challenge the dread Defenestrator and his Azure
Screen of Death. Alas, Cursor is merely some character's name.
What aswiz. 
The BBC
reports on the problem of translating a Mabinogion-based videogame
("Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches") into Welsh. I started
imagining the necessary commands for an old-style text adventure:
GO IRELAND. BRIDGE RIVER WITH OWN BODY.
DISGUISE SELF AS SWINEHERD. GET INTO CAULDRON.
TRANSFORM FLOWERS INTO GIRL. DO OWLS.
Advanced stages would be fiendishly hard to guess, as in the frustrating
Hitchhiker game: FEAST SEVEN YEARS WITH BRAN'S TALKING
HEAD. REMOVE VIRGIN'S FEET FROM MATH'S LAP.
STAND WITH ONE FOOT ON GOAT AND OTHER ON BATHTUB. And
when you'd conquered a particularly difficult puzzle, the software would
retort THOUGH THOU GETTEST THAT, THERE IS THAT THOU WILT NOT
GET! before opening the way to another teaser.  The
Ansible
convention reports page is now up to date.  A certain sf
title by D.G. Compton has been cited so often in Langford columns that,
when kindly Brian Ameringen included a copy in
his catalogue, I felt
obliged to acquire it. Something to bear in mind for the next time you
play sf charades:

7
August 2009 Once again I'm missing a Worldcon,
Anticipation in
Montréal, but please don't assume this plunges me into an
abysmal dark night of the soul. Yes, it would be good to see various
friends (you know who you are) and explore a new city, but so much of
the convention itself would be wasted on me. Even with my latest hearing
aid I have difficulty in following programme items, especially
multi-person panels, and small conversations in quiet surroundings
aren't easy amid the teeming hordes of Worldcon. Like many a bewildered
newcomer, I tend to wander around feeling lonely. Less grandiose events
are so much easier to cope with: Novacon?
Corflu UK? And the upcoming
Eastercon, while somewhat
bigger, is so conveniently close to Reading that I could almost commute.
 The August Ansible
appeared on Friday 31 July for no more sinister reason than that the
copy shop closes over the weekend (yes, unbelievers, there is still
a print edition) and I
didn't want to wait for Monday. Some website changes: the
Books Received page now
includes Magazines Received, with links, and I've nearly finished
indexing all the past
convention coverage for the convenience of sf/fan historians. 
Current reading:
Greg
Egan's collectionOceanic,
for a New Scientist review. Coincidence time: he
wrote to Ansible
about a tendency to link him with photos of
an entirely different
Greg Egan, and very soon after I found a supposed
Greg
Egan on Facebook who identified himself as the sf author but used
the wrong photo. Complaints have been filed. See the newly added note on
"our" Egan's home page.

L.
Ron Hubbard in the news again.

29
July 2009 Now
this
review, from Rick Kleffel at The Agony Column, is just
what I needed to cheer me up amid the general sogginess of British July
weather. Thanks, Rick.

17
July 2009 I've been exploring the
Google Book Settlement
site (see also
here),
which
does
not make it quick or easy to discover which of your books have
been digitized without permission. Trying to check on short stories and
essays -- "inserts" in Google jargon -- is even more
laborious: you need to locate the anthology via a title search, specify
the page range of your contribution (a tiresome requirement if it's an
edition you've never seen), assert your rights ... and only then are you
allowed the opportunity to discover whether the book has been
Googleized. I tried this for my four Hartwell/Cramer Year's Best SF
appearances and drew a blank each time; I don't think I have the heart
to jump through the same hoops for each of the remaining 154 items
here. (Google
Person, rubbing hands together: "Yesss! Another win!") 
Men
with huge forearms.  That
Oxfam
bookshop event of 11 July: the local press
has
the last word.

10
July 2009 Another gap, since our place in North Wales -- where
we've been for the last week -- is still an internet-free zone. No great
excitement to report. Meals were eaten, pubs patronized, charity shops
pillaged, and the rocky end of Harlech beach searched for a perfectly
formed doorstop. I read
Neal
Asher'slatest
sf novel for SFX review, and we established contact with a
long-lost cousin in the Porthmadog area (Hazel talked family trees a
lot). Now home, picking up the pieces and being cheered by a small
Wildside Press royalty check plus a much larger tax refund, an entity
previously thought as elusive as Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. 
Tomorrow, as recorded
here, Brian Stableford and I will flaunt our egos at the local
Oxfam
bookshop!

30
June 2009 Although the weather gauge is stuck firmly at Too
Bloody Hot, I've managed to deal with all my current deadline work and
publish (a day early) the July
Ansible. Another
SFX column
also went on line a day or two ago, as did
some reviews.
Now I'm planning to take a short break from the evil brain-eating
Internet, so please don't expect quick replies to email.  I don't
think brother Jon's name has previously been dropped in
a
Guardian obituary. Steve Wells was his flatmate in Leeds
in the early 1980s: "I illustrated his 'ranting' poetry book and
produced his record, did the covers for his fanzine etc. Very nice man
but never did the washing up." Meanwhile Wikipedia has
added
new terrors to death -- although that story greatly exaggerates
the importance of a solitary loon with a grudge.  Here's that nice
Geoff Willmetts of SF Crowsnestreviewing
Starcombing. I don't know where his statistic "85%
material that was first seen in UK's 'SFX' magazine" comes from --
it's 71% of the contents list but, since SFX pieces have to be
short, about 40% by word count . He explained: "I count chapters.
Counting every word would mean transferring to a word processor or
having the entire population of my town's fingers and toes to use as
counting digits." I would gladly have deployed cutting-edge
technology to count the words for him, and indeed I did, but to no
avail.  The past tense in this sign outside a Reading pub (The
Horn) conveys an elegiac sadness....

17
June 2009 The
Oxfam
bookshop in central Reading has posters saying that the "highly
regarded Science Fiction authors" Brian Stableford and I will be
reading and talking there on 11 July (6pm-8pm), so it looks as though
the event is going ahead. Admission by ticket, free from the shop --
which has also taken over from boring old Waterstone's as the official
local outlet for (again free) paper copies of Ansible.

7
June 2009 In accordance with
the recent debate on
reviewing ethics, Adam Roberts finds himself
unable
to review Starcombing. But he fails so very nicely, and
I'm grateful.  Speaking of ethics, I was kindly invited to join
the Science Fiction and
Fantasy Ethics group site. "Ethics" here would seem to
have the little-known meaning "positive reviews only". Good
luck to them, but (no doubt because I am a miserable sod) I feel
uncomfortable with that title. The Ethics Committee, the Moral Majority?
My own reviews, I hope, manage to be reasonably ethical despite my
failure to write them while wearing a bright red leotard with ETHICSMAN!
blazoned across the chest. That would be so embarrassing. 
Yesterday on Facebook, irritated by a new spate of postings along the
lines of "XXX took the 'Which Star Trek/Star Wars/Doctor Who/Jane
Austen/etc etc character are you?' quiz and found he/she was ...",
I claimed to have completed the "Which woodlouse are you?"
test. Certain people took this seriously and asked where they could find
it. This is what Facebook does to the brain.  Reverting to the
ethics of reviewing, there's a
spinoff
discussion at SF Signal. Ethical links:
Jeff
Vandermeer, Cheryl
Morgan,
Everything
Is Nice,
Asking
the Wrong Questions.

2
June 2009 Even after hundreds of issues, there's still a
certain high of excitement in finishing
another Ansible
and causing it to sweep the world like a very small swine-flu pandemic.
But I always feel gloomy on the day after. Bear with me.

23
May 2009 Yesterday was Abigail Frost's funeral at the East
London Crematorium. SF fans in attendance were Roz Kaveney (who spoke at
the ceremony), Avedon Carol and Rob Hansen, Graham and Pat Charnock,
Nick Lowe, and myself. Also, of course, family -- her Aunt Jill told us
a lot about Abigail's life -- Old Labour comrades and a crafts journal
editor who promises some published AJF articles for
the memorial site. (Several
people there had read and liked this, which was a relief.) I hadn't
known or hadn't registered that Abigail's middle initial J stood for
Jenny.  And now it's time for
<plokta.con>
Release 4.0.

20
May 2009 One final note about the new books: I have been
gloating uncontrollably over stacks of authors' copies of
Starcombing
and The Limbo Files,
both looking very spiffy, especially the hardbacks of the former. Then I
had to stop gloating and start mailing out copies to Adam Roberts (Starcombing
introduction) and others of the usual suspects....  Andrew Porter
forwarded a message titled "Zombie Banks", which proved to be
something to do with international financial horrors. My first thought,
though, was of Zombie M. Banks -- author of the Zombie Culture novels in
which vast undead spacecraft (General Shambling Vehicles) lurch across
the galaxy, filling the ether with slurred and insatiable transmissions
of MINNNDS ... MINNNDS ... MINNNDS ...  Going to one of
Martin Hoare's favourite real-ale pubs can be
very like this.

14
May 2009 Maybe I didn't read Terry Pratchett's A Hat Full
of Sky closely enough first time around. As students of Langfordiana
may recall, my "Blit" story sequence deals with
mind-destroying
fractal images and has been alluded to in fiction by Greg Egan,
Ken MacLeod and
Charles
Stross. Now in A Hat Full of Sky I notice that the final
written ravings of a wizard whose mind is being destroyed include --
just three words from the incoherent end -- "blit!!!!!"

13
May 2009 Roz Kaveney tells me (and has since told the world
via LiveJournal)
that Abigail Frost's funeral
will be at the East London Crematorium at noon on Friday 22 May. 
At last I have steeled myself to book a room for
<plokta.con>
at Sunningdale Park, Berks, and hope to see some of you there.

12
May 2009 Thanks to Yvonne Rousseau for pointing out that the
Amazon (US and UK) links to my new collection
Starcombing
are now working. If only HTML offered <SUBLIM>
tags within which I could subtly enclose the message "Buy it buy it
buy it!"

29
April 2009 Apologies to anyone who was expecting to see me
knocking back free drinks at the Arthur C. Clarke Award presentation
tonight. The cold has not entirely gone away, and I've been getting too
many swine 'flu jokes in recent days....  Meanwhile at Cosmos
Books, we finalized a cover design (by Juha T. Lindroos) for Starcombing
-- not long to be denied you.

13
April 2009 What did I do during the Easter Bank Holiday?
Celebrated my birthday with pies for lunch at
a
favourite pub which happens to be next door to a barber's. Sent
the new Langford collection Starcombing to Sean Wallace at
Cosmos Books: 85 newly collected nonfiction pieces with an ...
interesting ... introduction by Adam Roberts; more of this when it's
available. Treated myself to a shoe-stretching device (because I find it
increasingly difficult to buy off-the-peg shoes that actually fit) and
was fascinated by the accompanying kit of plastic wens, bunions and
buboes to customize the thing for one's very own vile deformity. Had my
smallest ever Premium Bond win (£25). Attended bits of the
Bradford Eastercon fan programme
through the miracles of internet video streaming and found that --
exactly as though I'd been there in person -- I couldn't hear more than
occasional scattered phrases through the general uproar.
Tried to
describe Ansible for the ClarkesworldSave the Semiprozine Hugo
site; was tempted to quote one recent appreciator's phrase "infantile
shitsheet" but decided not to stir him up again. Did tricky
crosswords, went walking in the rain, delivered another Interzone
column with the now-obligatory photo,
started reading an allegedly comic fantasy for
SFXreview.... What dissipated
holiday fun.

9
April 2009 Extensive tests at the Audiology Dept, Royal Berks
Hospital. Maybe a new hearing aid, or aids, to follow. Maybe an
improvement....

7
April 2009 Our visitors -- Bill
and Mary Burns, in the UK to be fan guests of honour at
Eastercon -- have come and gone, and
there has been much catching-up with work neglected while having fun in
pubs. That book review was duly delivered to SFX, with a vast
sigh of relief.  Wildlife studies: there are now at least five
black swans among the huge white flock on the Kennet & Avon Canal
just down the road. Meanwhile, in our own back garden, we have observed
the Suicide Dove! A couple of very inept collared doves are
nest-building in the pear tree, or rather, carrying twigs up to a
singularly unsuitable branch and watching in bafflement as they fall off
again. Then one dove discovered treasure-trove by the shed: Hazel's box
of recently gathered weeds and twigs. Leaning against the shed,
unfortunately, is an old mirror ... leading to a cycle of (a) inspect
twigs; (b) notice alien dove in mirror; (c) study rival intently from
various angles; (d) attack and bounce off; (e) fly to shed roof to
recover from vicious unprovoked blow; (f) return to twigs and repeat. I
should have taken a video, I suppose, but instead we moved the box. No
use: the Unforgivable Territorial Interloper now had priority over mere
nest-building, and to prevent concussion Hazel had to put a sack over
the mirror.  Gosh, here's a Langford namecheck in
Dr
Dobb's Journal.

3
April 2009 Pause for breath.
Ansible 261
duly came out on 1 April, with only
a trace of foolery,
and then the late London news started to arrive. The
sf
lecture at the Royal Institution on 7 April could be added to the
links page, but there was no URL for this alarming information sent by
Erik Arthur of the legendary genre bookshop Fantasy Centre: "Be
the first to know that Ted and Erik have decided that once our lease
expires in June, we shall not renew it and Fantasy Centre will close
down after nearly forty years of trading." (2 April) Oh dear.
It's the end of an era, it really is.  I'm supposed to be writing
a massive book review -- that is, a slim review of a massive book which
I'm only halfway through -- so may be a bit slow replying to email over
the next few days.

22
March 2009 I hope no one will be too horrified by my latest
tweak to the Ansible site. For some time I've been thinking that
the links page
(dense with information and frequently updated) would be a much better "front
page" than the
traditional one here. When I
floated this idea in
Ansible nearly a year ago, no one objected -- actually, no
one took the slightest notice -- so at last I have plucked up courage
and done the deed. What do you think?

20
March 2009 It's that
Hugo shortlist
time of the year. Looks like a good ballot. Thanks to all who enjoyed my
efforts enough to place me among the Fan Writer finalists again. No, I'm
not bothered that Ansible
has at last slipped off the Semiprozine list -- fiddling it into that
category started as hardly more than a joke (though with the serious
intent of removing it from competition in Best Fanzine) and led to major
bogglement when in 2005 it actually won. The editor of Interzone
is probably still sticking pins into a small wax image of D. Langford. 
I wish I could make it to Anticipation
in Montréal to lose with appropriate grace, but it doesn't seem
feasible. You don't want to hear what the last several months of UK bank
rate cuts have done to my modest savings income. Neither, to be frank,
do I.

17
March 2009 The Aged P. was let out of hospital yesterday
afternoon, and Hazel (after a weekend return to Reading) is again
looking after him in Wheatley.  I finished, more or less, the Starcombing
index and layout. While I was still brutally oppressing the poor widows
and orphans, there came a pleasant surprise when an sf author of some
note -- who actually reads this page -- offered to contribute an
introduction. Gosh!  Is my hearing getting worse, I wonder, or was
last night's Reading SF Group meeting in an acoustically impossible pub?
The bloody awful music seemed carefully tuned to hearing-aid-jamming
frequencies....  Home Alone, part 5,271,009: attack of the killer
teapot! The handle suddenly broke off while I was pouring, barefoot in a
dressing-gown: just managed to leap back from the scalding flood.
Whatever next? Oh yes, the VAT return.

12
March 2009 Another gap. My father-in-law has been worryingly
ill: Hazel went to stay with and look after him, and soon had to arrange
a transfer by ambulance into hospital. The problem proved to be
pneumonia. Now, at last, thanks to a heavy and continuing input of
antibiotics, he seems to be on the mend.  To take my mind off all
this while alone in the house (how does this microwave thing work,
exactly?), I've been obsessively indexing a fat new collection of my SF
essays, reviews and columns, tentatively titled Starcombing and
-- I hope -- to be published as usual by Cosmos Books. Look on my works,
ye mighty, because I need the royalties.  My mother, though in
excellent health, always gets a bit upset by official-looking letters
addressed to my father (who died in 2001). The latest to cause maternal
alarm is headed, in bold type, "Are you considering your exit
strategies ...?"

28
February 2009 In brief: bad night, feeling shitty, not coming
to Picocon after all. I don't suppose anyone was banking on it.

27
February 2009 It had to happen some day. The plug has been
pulled on the UK SF Fandom Archive at Glasgow University, set up by
Naveed Khan in the early 1990s and for many years the host of
Ansible (long since
moved), Bridget Wilkinson's Fans Across the World News (now
apparently homeless), Rob Hansen's history of UK fandom (Then,
which Rob is letting me host here
at ansible.co.uk for the time being), the 1993 SF Encyclopedia
and 1997 Fantasy Encyclopedia addenda (which I have hastily
reinstated here and
here), and various
further oddments including The Eye of Argon (long mirrored
here at ansible.co.uk).
When time permits I'll see what else seems worth saving from the
wreckage. 
Picocon
tomorrow is still a possibility for me ... if the weather doesn't turn
nasty.

26
February 2009 A couple of updates. First: the traditional
Langford email address, ansible [at] cix co uk, has been around for 16
years but may not continue indefinitely. No rush, but could
correspondents please start using drl [at] ansible co uk? Yes, I've
updated the contact page.  Second:
after mighty wrestling with the Irish PLR paperwork (see
20 February below), I had a friendly email from
their office wondering why I hadn't simply signed the form allowing my
book details to be effortlessly transferred from the UK PLR system?
Because, in their infinite wisdom, the UK PLR lot sent this form to
everyone who received a paper statement this year but saved electrons by
not telling those of us who read our statements on line. Here's the
relevant
UK
PLR page, with a downloadable form which I hope will save some of
my visitors a lot of work. Too late for me. Grumble, grumble. 
It's been a long reclusive winter: I'm tempted to visit London for
Picocon
this Saturday, if only to swill cheap beer and bask in the golden voice
of Pat Cadigan saying "You dog." We shall see.

20
February 2009 So far it's been a hard-working but not
apparently very productive month. Many headaches. Eye test booked, with
much fear and trembling at the likely costs. No change detected; new
glasses not needed; general sighs of relief....  Maura McHugh
points out that Ireland has introduced a PLR
scheme (although they call it Public Lending Remuneration rather
than any effete nonsense about authors having
Rights), and that British and
other EU authors are also eligible. Good for Ireland! Herewith links to
the information leaflet and
application forms -- the
latter being an interactive PDF which, on my system at least, allows
only one title to be entered in the all-important "Section F --
Book Details" page.  It's bright and sunny today, but earlier
in the month, while I was finishing
Ansible 259,
the view from my office window
looked
like this.

12
February 2009 Sam Jordison at the Guardian continues his long
trawl through the Hugo-winning novels -- this time,
The
Man in the High Castle. When I put on my pedant's hat to add
an explanatory comment about why the grasshopper lies heavy, the
reaction was slightly boggling (scroll down from above link). Me, like
royalty? Gorblimey.

29
January 2009 The Department of Bizarre Coincidences struck
again yesterday. With the aid of home-made software I added permalinks
to what was intended to be the complete run of
Ansible back issues,
so that every story has its own URL and can be directly linked to. What
I didn't immediately realize was that this broke the
"As Others See Us"
random-dip script. Naturally yesterday was also the day chosen by
the Guardian to
link
to Ansible and this very script, which was embarrassingly
serving up relevant extracts from only three or four issues that somehow
escaped the great permalink reform. Now fixed, but oh dear! Still,
Murphy's Law cuts both ways: if I hadn't missed those few documents, the
script would have stuck at "Loading" and never shown anything
at all....

24
January 2009 After the US presidential inauguration, I tried
some of the beer that Martin Hoare gave us for Christmas and was able to
write on Facebook: "Bush was drunk today. I have absolute proof ..."
(The Bush brand of Belgian beer is very strong and very nice. Down the
hatch, and into the sewers of history!)  Meanwhile, my little
brother is a megastar in that fearful local rag the
South
Wales Argus! "They got a lot of things wrong,"
grumbled our mother, who nevertheless believes everything she reads in
the infinitely more ghastly Daily Express.

19
January 2009 Charlie Stross has mentioned Earthdoom in
his
on-line diary comments, leading to a couple of how-to-buy-it
enquiries. My page on this novel has
links to the 2003 BeWrite editions, paperback and ebook.  In the
post: the March issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
with my "Curiosities" piece on Colin Kapp's Transfinite
Man (aka The Dark Mind).

18
January 2009 What have I been doing for the last two weeks? Er
um well. There must have been something.... A book review or two, a
column for SFX. Some time wasted, in a fun sort of way, in
fulfilling a New Year Resolution to complete the difficult "Track
8: Hard" of
Bloons
3 and then swear off this terrible thing forever. More time
wasted, probably, scanning stuff for
an archive of my
old fanzine Twll-Ddu. This is avowedly incomplete owing to
a high incidence of embarrassment and possible libel (those were the
days), but almost all the artwork is now on line. Meanwhile, there was
also a certain amount of fiddling with software. Another
New-Year-resolution project which I hope won't be a further
waste of time was to get the hang of creating Windows .CHM help files,
since the traditional .HLP format used for all past Ansible Information
Windows software is no longer supported in Vista. After a few days of
obsessive effort, I smugly report success. Look on my works, ye mighty
...

3
January 2009 "Ansible
258 -- An Apology. We are very sorry about Ansible 258."
No, no, that's an old Private Eye gag. I thought I'd finished
sending out all paper and electronic copies of Ansible by
mid-evening yesterday, but the email version got stuck on the list
server overnight and I didn't prise it loose until this morning. The
Plain People of Fandom: Who cares? Myself: You'd be
surprised what some people complain about.

2
January 2009 Once again, the hand of fate intervenes in the
production of Ansible. I took the masters of
this month's issue to
Reading town centre, intending to get copies run off at the usual small
print shop -- which was closed for the holidays. Time to investigate our
recently opened branch of Kinko's, where the chap behind the counter
took a worryingly long time to calculate that my modest order would cost
more than three times as much as usual. Blimey! Grumpily I went home to
coax copies out of my poor overworked laser printer instead; and found
email from Gordon Van Gelder confirming it was OK to publish
his shock F&SF
news, hitherto revealed only in confidence. So I tore up the
master sheets and started re-editing....